Become a Social Media Expert in Three Easy Steps

Looking to enhance your resume? Need that extra ego boost? Want to get a raise?

You too can become a Social Media Expert in three easy steps:

Print out the graphic above.

Cut out the certificate.

Hang it on your wall.

Congratulations! You’re now a Social Media Expert.

More and more marketers claim this stupendous accomplishment, as if posting their Facebook, Twitter or Instagram makes them an “expert.”

I recently spoke to someone who claimed such an expertise. The company’s social media strategy focused on Facebook. As the claim under this person’s leadership, the company had doubled its following, I inquired how many “Likes” total the Facebook page had.

“If I had to guesstimate, I’d say around 60,” the person responded.

“Sixty?” I asked back.

“Oh yes,” the person beamed. “But most of them aren’t our customers. They aren’t even people who should be following us.”

I attempted to maintain a straight face and asked how this person intended to increase the following and reach the target audience.

“We have all our customers’ e-mail addresses, so I guess we could use those,” was the reply.

I am baffled at anyone who claims expertise at anything, but most especially at social media.

Facebook arrived in the public’s consciousness around 2007, followed by Twitter and all the others. It wasn’t until 2009 or 2010 when business marketing really took hold in the mediums we know as social media.

For now, it’s the wild west still. This new frontier of the marketing world produces a few successes, but most are failures and many boom towns turn into ghost towns quickly.

Social media marketing is an arrow in the quiver and nothing more. A good social media campaign contains its roots in a fully integrated effort across multiple media platforms.